A Brilliant, Incendiary Joan of Arc Story for a Ravaged Earth

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By Jeff VanderMeer

April 25, 2017

THE BOOK OF JOAN By Lidia Yuknavitch 266 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch’s brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms. “The Book of Joan” has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard. Yet it’s also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum.

The novel opens in 2049, then looks back at a past that is our future. Earth has been devastated by global warming, a crisis exacerbated by incessant warfare over scarce resources. Orbiting the planet is CIEL, a “man-made, free-floating” colony consisting of “redesigned remnants from old space stations” and ruled by the “rage-mouthed Empire Leader” Jean de Men. (Appropriately, his name evokes men and demons alike.) Among other dubious accomplishments, de Men claims the defeat, after a battle at the Alberta Tar Sands, of the “heretic” child-rebel Joan.

CIEL carries the last remnants of humankind, intent on destroying the Earth below by siphoning off anything of value through “invisible technological umbilical cords” called Skylines. But there are dissenters aboard. One is Trinculo Forsythe, who created CIEL but has undergone years of imprisonment and torture and is now scheduled for execution on trumped-up charges. Another is Trinculo’s partner and the book’s narrator, Christine Pizan, who at 49 is about to age out, a “threat to resources in a finite, closed system.” In protest against de Men and all he represents, Pizan is determined to keep the story of Joan’s heroism alive by burning it into her skin. This is the “Book of Joan” that we are reading. “Once, she had a voice,” Pizan proclaims. “Now her voice is in my body.”

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Lidia YuknavitchCreditAndrew Kovalev

“Burning is an art,” Pizan explains, neatly linking art and protest, though not without cost: “Burning epidermis gives off a charcoal-like smell.” Her physical pain symbolizes the agony caused by the ecological devastation and loss felt daily in our own time by those who suffer the most extreme effects of displacement and scarcity, of unrestrained capitalism. “Why is it that you, reading this, don’t feel that pain?” is the question implied, again and again, by “The Book of Joan.”

The sublimely heightened prose in the novel’s opening sections introduces the stark futuristic details of Pizan’s world: “My head is white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we interact with technology.… My skin is … Siberian. Bleak and stinging.”

If storytelling is, in Pizan’s hands, a form of resistance, in those of de Men it has become a form of control. Having first found fame as a self-help guru, he now uses propaganda and mythologizing — what Yuknavitch calls “narrative grafts” — to deploy information as a weapon. Like our era’s current tyrants, he’s both terrifying and buffoonish. And if he also calls to mind the pre-Enlightenment world, so too do the novel’s heroic characters, whose names invoke Joan of Arc and the medieval feminist Christine de Pizan. (It’s less clear why Pizan’s partner is called Trinculo. Maybe his parents just liked “The Tempest”?)

As it unfolds, Joan’s story — including her early life and her discovery of “otherworldly combat techniques” like the temporary raising of the dead — is absorbing. These sections are written in an unadorned prose that nicely contrasts with the intense rhetoric of Pizan’s own narration. Key to Joan’s spiritual perspective is science, with its specialized vocabulary: “Xenotransplantation. … Sometimes Joan would spin around alone in a circle saying the beautiful word out loud to no one but her body, hands clasped over her heart, eyes closed, like praying.” Yet we read such passages in the certain knowledge that it will be Joan’s fate to live on a dying planet.

Adding yet another layer, “The Book of Joan” pays welcome attention to the surviving flora and fauna of the Earth — focusing in particular on the underground burrows that provide refuge from ecological catastrophe. It is a world the author makes vividly present as Joan hides in caves with ribbon eels below and “long-eared rabbit bats thriving overhead.” Here Yuknavitch skillfully draws on the work of climate-change philosophers like Timothy Morton, on the idea of life at “Earth magnitude,” a scale beyond the human.

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Animals have a direct impact on both Joan’s rebellion and her sense of self. “They made their lives — chose their world order,” we are told of oilbirds, one of the few birds that use echolocation to navigate. “Surely an evolutionary process, but to Joan, it was more an act of perfect imagination. They reminded her of her own warrior-child self.” Creatures like the olms, blind salamanders with electrical receptors “sunk deep into their epidermis,” emerge as a potent tool for the resistance against de Men. Other “wet-wired” organisms, “tens of thousands” of spiders, worms, salamanders and more, have also been deployed to combat the Skylines that threaten to deprive the planet of sustenance.

Events on Earth and CIEL — in the book of Joan and in the book of Pizan — will eventually converge with a startlingly cathartic sense of both tragedy and hope. Joan must face heart-wrenching truths, while de Men is revealed as even more repugnant than he initially seemed. In scenes reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s “Dune Messiah,” Joan must grapple with her destiny as an “engenderine,” poised between the human and the inanimate.

Herbert’s hero, as emperor of Dune, was a godlike figure with uncanny abilities who embodied both immense capacity for destruction and a chance for renewal, if only he could overcome the temptations inherent in his powers. Although de Men in some ways exemplifies the same struggle, Joan must confront the implications of her powers as well, a reminder that our ecosystems can suffer even from the acts of those with good intentions. But while Herbert’s writing, especially in the later Dune books, was marked by an airless abstraction, Yuknavitch’s prose is passionate and lyrical, very much in the moment. Fusing grand themes and the visceral details of daily life, she offers a revisionist corrective that shows the influence of writers like Clarice Lispector and Angela Carter. Like Carter, Yuknavitch writes about the body with an easy intimacy.

From her early experimental novels to her 2011 memoir, “The Chronology of Water,” and her previous novel, “The Small Backs of Children,” published in 2015 and partly set in war-torn Eastern Europe, Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant. By adding speculative elements to “The Book of Joan,” she reaches new heights with even higher stakes: the death or life of our planet.

Telling the truth with precision and rage and a visionary’s eye, using both realism and fabulism, is one way to break through the white noise of a consumerist culture that tries to commodify post-apocalyptic fiction, to render it safe. But in Yuknavitch’s work there’s no quick cauterizing of the wound, nothing to allow us to engage in escapism. The result is a rich, heady concoction, rippling with provocative ideas. There is nothing in “The Book of Joan” that is not a great gift to Yuknavitch’s readers, if only they are ready to receive it.